PUBLIC MARKS from camel with tags performance & configuration

November 2008

MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and stability. Within seconds, it will display statistics about your MySQL installation and the areas where it can be improved.
It’s key to remember that MySQLTuner is a script which can assist you with your server, but it is not the solution to a badly performing MySQL server. The best performance gains come from a thorough review of the queries sent to the server, and an evaluation of the MySQL server itself. A qualified developer in your application’s programming or scripting language should be able to work with a MySQL database administrator to find improvements for your server. Once the server and application are optimized well, you may need to consider hardware upgrades to the physical server itself.
This is a really useful tool for helping to optimize MySQL performance.Understanding the various my.cnf variables and how they affect performance can seem really complicated but this tool takes some of the pain away and makes it easier to understand the effects of each variable.It is especially useful to be able to see the global memory usage, memory usage per thread and the maximum possible memory usage - that is really valuable information that is otherwise complex to calculate.

August 2008

Opsview is enterprise network and application monitoring software designed for scalability, flexibility and ease of use. Opsview has been in development since 2003 and is released under the GNU GPL license. Current version is 2.12.
Opsview is a fully integrated monitoring tool that incorporates popular Open Source software including Nagios, Net-SNMP and RRDtool. The Catalyst web framework provides an extensible monitoring and configuration user interface.
Opsview software is supported on Linux (Debian, CentOS, RHEL and Ubuntu) and Solaris 10. It will monitor all common operating systems including Windows.
Opsview extends the capabilities of Nagios in the following ways:
* Distributed monitoring with high availability and fail-over
* Much improved SNMP support with trap processing with rules engine
* API supporting automation of Opsview configuration
* Data warehouse for storage of historical performance and event data
* Opsview Reports customisable reporting
* Powerful configuration and management UI
* Extended monitoring UI
* Extensible architecture based on Catalyst Web Framework and Altinity middleware software

March 2008

Caching is the temporary storage of frequently accessed data in higher speed media (typically SRAM or RAM) for more efficient retrieval. Web caching stores frequently used objects closer to the client through browser, proxy, or server caches. By storing "fresh" objects closer to your users, you avoid round trips to the origin server, reducing bandwidth consumption, server load, and most importantly, latency. This article shows how to configure your Apache server for more efficient caching to save bandwidth and improve performance.
Caching is not just for static sites, even dynamic sites can benefit from caching. Graphics and multimedia typically don't change as frequently as (X)HTML files. Graphics that seldom change like logos, headers, and navigation can be given longer expiration times while resources that change more frequently like XHTML and XML files can be given shorter expiration times. By designing your site with caching in mind, you can target different classes of resources to give them different expiration times with only a few lines of code.

June 2007

Apache server performance can be improved by adding additional hardware resources such as RAM, faster CPU, etc. But most of the time, the same result can be achieved by custom configuration of the server. This article looks into getting maximum performance out of Apache with the existing hardware resources, specifically on Linux systems.
Of course, it is assumed that there is enough hardware resources - especially enough RAM that the server isn’t swapping frequently. First two sections look into various Compile-Time and Run-Time configuration options. The Run-Time section assumes that Apache is compiled with prefork MPM. HTTP compression and caching is discussed next. Finally, using separate servers for serving static and dynamic contents is covered. Basic knowledge of compiling and configuring Apache and Linux are assumed.

Applications using the LAMP (Linux®, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) architecture are constantly being developed and deployed. But often the server administrator has little control over the application itself because it's written by someone else. This series of three articles discusses many of the server configuration items that can make or break an application's performance. This second article focuses on steps you can take to optimize Apache and PHP.
Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl) form the basis of the LAMP architecture for Web applications. Many open source packages based on LAMP components are available to solve a variety of problems. As the load on an application increases, the bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure become more apparent in the form of slow response to user requests. The previous article showed you how to tune the Linux system and covered the basics of LAMP and performance measurement. This article focuses on the Web server components, Apache and PHP.